Provo • As if coach Kalani Sitake didn’t have enough pressure heaped upon him to right the BYU football ship after last year’s disastrous 4-9 season, an entire Power 5 conference also needs the independent Cougars to get better quickly.
As veteran college football writer Jon Wilner pointed out in the San Jose Mercury News recently, nine Pac-12 teams will play a total of 18 games against the Cougars in the next five years. That’s 10 percent of the league’s nonconference total, according to Wilner’s research.
“The games themselves aren’t the issue,” Wilner wrote. “There is no issue unless the Cougars struggle in 2018 and beyond the way they struggled in 2017.